1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a permission management apparatus and a permission management method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A user uses the rights granted by a service provider in a store. For example, the user carries various cards, such as a credit card issued by a credit company and a point card issued by a store that offers a point service, and exercises the rights according to the cards, such as payment by the credit card and use of points, by presenting the cards in the store. However, in some cases, somebody else may steal the user's identity and exercise the user's rights. For example, if the user is to exercise the rights by using a card, the user carries the card; therefore, there is a risk in that the user may lose the card and the lost card may be used for fraud by a person impersonating the user.
Therefore, as a technology for preventing unauthorized use of a lost card, for example, a technology has been proposed in which a query is sent by electronic mail to a bank server before a cash card is used and a lock is released so that the cash card can be used with an automated teller machine (ATM) (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2007-12009).
However, in the conventional technology, it is necessary to construct a system to release the lock for each type of the cards, and a store needs to cope with each of the systems. Furthermore, the user needs to learn and manage a rule to release the lock individually for each of the cards. Namely, in the conventional technology, to prevent unauthorized use of the rights, it is necessary to construct a system to release the lock for each of the rights to be managed and a user needs to learn rules to release the respective locks, which is cumbersome.